Information Architecture in Contemporary Television Series

The purpose of this paper is to apply some of the principles of IA to a disciplinary sector that is adjacent but has not traditionally considered this kind of approach. Basically, what we suggest in the paper, is the need to adopt a wider vision of IA, considering it as the design of every shared information environment. Therefore, in our paper, we propose to apply IA principles to the media field, also trying a synthesis with principles and topics that come from other study fields (such as semiotics, media studies etc.) and that are traditionally associated to TV series, demonstrating relevant intersections point. Thus, our ultimate purpose is offering a cross-disciplinary approach capable of taking advantage from all those fields together. In order to do so, we will focus our paper on some relevant changes that affected the TV series production in recent years, suggesting that we cannot consider a TV series as just “a text” anymore, but instead we need to study and analyze TV series as narrative ecosystems, that is to say as a composite environment, able to integrate the energy flows originated by users, technologies and media items